What's Wrong With Human Rights?

##### "The Attack on Human Rights" by Michael Ignatieff, in Foreign Affairs (Nov.–Dec. 2001), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.

Even human-rights activists have been plagued by doubts in recent decades: Isn’t the claim that all humans are endowed with certain inalienable rights just a mask the West uses as it seeks to impose its values on other cultures? The critics—from Muslim fundamentalists to postmodernist academics in the West—have a point, argues Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. But it’s not the one they think they have.

"Rights discourse is individualistic," he says. "But that is precisely why it has proven an effective remedy against tyranny, and why it has proven attractive to people from very different cultures." Setting basic standards of "human decency" empowers the powerless.

The push for human rights has not come exclusively from the West, Ignatieff points out. Though the West took the lead in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, representatives of Islamic and other non-Western traditions also took part. Moreover, the document itself—coming in the aftermath of World War II and at the dawning of the Cold War—was much less a proclamation of Western superiority than a warning to avoid recent European mistakes.

In the half-century since, says Ignatieff, it has become more apparent that the West does not speak with one voice about specific human rights. The British, the French, and the Americans construe such rights as privacy, free speech, and possession of firearms differently. On issues such as capital punishment and abortion, America and Europe are increasingly at odds.

Yet the splintering of the Western consensus does not necessarily presage the demise of the human rights movement, according to Ignatieff. Rather, it signals the movement’s belated "recognition that we live in a world of plural cultures" whose diverse views deserve to be heard. "Western activists have no right to overturn traditional cultural practice, provided that such practice continues to receive the assent of its members."

Human rights advocates, says Ignatieff, the author of Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998), should adopt philosopher Berlin’s concepts of "negative" and "positive" liberty. "The doctrine of human rights is morally universal, because it says that all human beings need certain specific freedoms ‘from’; it does not go on to define what their freedom ‘to’ should comprise." Muslim women who demand the right not to be tortured or abused are not therefore obliged to adopt Western dress or lifestyles. And the very fact that many among the non-Western world’s "powerless" are demanding such basic human rights gives the global movement legitimacy. Instead of apologizing for their cause, human rights activists need to press it harder.